The latest addition to my website is Marie Darrieussecq‘s Il faut beaucoup aimer les hommes [You Should Love Men a Lot]. This book has not yet been translated into English but almost certainly will be. It tells the story of Solange, whom we met in her previous book Clèves (All the Way). She is now … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Marie Darrieussecq‘s Tom est mort (Tom is Dead). This is (fictitious) tale of a woman whose four-and-a-half year old son dies in an accident – we are not given the details till the end of the book – and what happens to her afterwards. She is writing ten … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Antonio Muñoz Molina‘s La noche de los tiempos (UK: The Depths of Time; US: In the Night of Time), a very long book telling the story of a successful architect from a relatively poor background during the period leading up to the Spanish Civil War and the period … Read more
The latest addition to my website is valter hugo mãe‘s o apocalipse dos trabalhadores [The Apocalypse of the Workers]. mãe spells his name and writes all of his books in lower case, an annoying quirk. This novel tells the story of Maria da Graça, a cleaning lady for a rich man, Mr. Ferreira, who dreams … Read more
The latest addition to my website is valter hugo mãe‘s a máquina de fazer espanhóis [The Machine for Making Spaniards]. Note that he spells his name and writes his books entirely in lowercase. Apart from that annoying quirk, this really is an excellent novel. It tells the story of Antonio Silva, an eighty-four year old … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Upamanyu Chatterjee‘s The Mammaries of the Welfare State. This is a follow-up to Chatterjee’s English, August and continues the story of Agastya Sen, an Indian civil servant. I say that it continues his story, which it does, but the book is essentially a long, vicious, occasionally witty satire … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Josef Škvorecký‘s Nevysvetlitelný príbeh aneb Vyprávení Questa Firma Sicula (An Inexplicable Story or the Narrative of Questus Firmus Siculus). This is a tongue-in-cheek Ovid novel, purporting to be a 1st century Roman manuscript, written by a man whose mother may have been Ovid’s lover. The manuscript is inexplicably … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Lawrence Durrell‘s Nunquam, the second-part of a two part series, started with Tunc. This one starts off where Tunc ended and finds Felix Charlock in a sanatorium, with a head wound. When he recovers, the mysterious Julian, with whom he has talked many times but never actually meets, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Richard Powers‘ Orfeo. This one follows Powers’ usual themes of technology, music and politics, telling the story of Peter Els, musician and scientist. At the start of the novel, Els is seventy and living alone. He is experimenting with gene splicing. We later learn that he is, in … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Arnon Grunberg‘s Onze oom [Our Uncle]. This is a long and quite complicated novel, set in an unnamed Latin American country where there is a war on terror going on. Major Anthony, known only by his first name and with an English name because of his father’s anglophilia, … Read more